John Moore: A slippery slope to … overwrought libertarian fear-mongering

A slippery slope to … overwrought libertarian fear-mongering

First they come for your Big Gulp, then they come for your children. Left-wing control freaks always start small, but their goal is a one world dictatorship with mandated vegetarianism, seniors euthanized against their will and full personhood for cats. At least, that’s how the story goes.

Andrew Coyne is a reasonable man, so it’s hard to pick a fight with his front-page Tuesday think piece — titled, “Liberty: At least don’t give it away” — in which he offered that banning large soda cups and forcing cyclists into helmets are instances of overweening government. Where I would pick a fight with him and others is on the notion that these initiatives represent a slippery slope toward global serfdom.

It’s a common talking point on right-wing radio and television, particularly in the United States. In the jittery world of Rush Limbaugh and Fox television, every day brings a new outrageous example of how liberals are stealing freedom. And when they can’t really prove the case, they simply make stuff up.

The “war on trans fats” (it’s always a war) is a perfect example. Processed-food producers and restaurants have used trans fats for years, because they’re cheaper than regular oil. They’re also terrible for your health. Trans fats are the leaded gas of the food industry. But when governments began to move on the products in the last decade, the freedom brigade went nuts. Unable to mount a cogent argument as to why a demonstrably unhealthy product was essential to food production, they insisted instead that it was essential to liberty. Government wasn’t banning a harmful industrial practice, it was taking away your French fries and donuts and telling you what you can and cannot eat! Trans fats were widely banned. Yet french fries live on.

This past week, right here in Canada, the freedom brigade was handed a new drum to bang on: An Ottawa man whose children were being taken away because he’s too fat.

That rang all of the gongs for talk radio; children being torn away from their loving father because he doesn’t live up to some Lulu-

Lemon-wearing urban liberal’s standards of healthfulness. Except what was left out of most accounts is that a judge found the father had a history of drugs and violence, used to run a grow-op, and spent most of his time either at the gym or in marathon on-line gaming sessions. Perhaps not the victim of nanny-statism we originally thought.

At the core of this paranoia about losing freedom is the emergence of a new and twisted school of libertarianism.

As argued by the likes of Glenn Beck, any government interference with the individual is offside. This “all regulation is bad” notion ignores essentially half of the philosophy as laid out by John Stewart Mill, who posited that one should be free to do what one wants up until the point that it interferes with another person’s freedom. You can’t get all huffy about the right to smoke if a non-smoker is forced to choke on the exhaust.

Andrew Coyne is quite correct that government routinely oversteps. One should be free to drink a Big Gulp while riding a bicycle without a helmet, so long as it does not cause one to run over a pedestrian. But the notion that this kind of noisomeness is an incremental form of Stalinism is a bit of a stretch.